You plan. Then you build. Then you move in. Makes perfect sense if you’re building a house. But is this traditional, time-consuming process really appropriate if what you’re moving into is a digital platform?
You could probably guess that my answer is going to be “no,” but in reality it’s not far off from how some organizations still think about creating any digital presence. Sales & marketing has an idea, and sends it off to the IT department for development. Then it goes back to sales & marketing for review and feedback. Chances are it also makes a stop at compliance before it’s revised. It goes back through the process again ad nauseum until it’s deemed ready for launch. By then you’ve spent countless hours (read: $$$$) before a single customer has had a whiff of what you’re doing.
As we’ve helped companies make the move into digital, we’ve also steered them away from this kind of sequential thinking. Instead, we encourage them to embrace making progress in waves.
Now there is plenty of traditional marketing that behaves just fine when working sequentially. I mean, you can’t print part of a brochure, send it out for feedback, then print the rest. But digital gives you the advantage of refining and evolving your presence over shorter periods of time.
For example, if we’re helping a client develop a new digital platform, a big hurdle is getting full buy-in from the team. A budget-friendly and quick-to-market strategy would be to start a blog and share content via social media. This allows you to track and measure traffic, as well as to see which topics resonate most with your audience. It’s a simple method to get a jump-start on building a following, amplifying your best content, and getting those all-too critical head nods from all the project stakeholders.
